


too much love will kill you

by winchesters



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: M/M, TW: Suicide, kaiju groupies, tw: depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 10:25:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/964848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchesters/pseuds/winchesters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's hate at first sight. And then it's love. But it's just not enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	too much love will kill you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NotAllThoseWhoWander](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotAllThoseWhoWander/gifts).



> I cried while writing this. No biggie. Please comment if you feel inclined to do so.

I.   
It’s hate at first sight: Hermann sneering at the state of the PPDC’s cramped lab, Newt sneering at Hermann’s frumpy grandpa clothes. The mood doesn’t lighten when Pentecost leaves, and they end up bitching at each other while Hermann swears in German (he doesn’t know that Newt’s mother is-was-a native speaker). It’s not so bad with the other researchers there, a small team of biologists and a couple of grad students sent over from the university to help Hermann with his mathematics-not that he needs it, and seems to prefer working alone. But then, one by one, the world-renowned doctors and physicists begin to leave, the struggling PPDC no longer able to afford their high salaries on a shoe-string budget. Soon, there are only a few starving grad students left from Hong Kong universities...and Newt and Hermann. The low pay and cramped, low-tech facilities of the Shatterdome have long since driven the rest away. Newt has his own reasons for staying, mostly his desire for recognition (which, get real, will never happen) and his poorly hidden obsession with the fearsome beasts who have destroyed half the world’s coastlines by now. He questions Hermann about it one night, after the last of the remaining grad students have left for the evening.   
“Why are you still here?” Newt demands, sidling up to where Hermann is scrawling madly on a sheet already covered in his almost illegible equations. The mathematician glances up over his glasses, peeved.   
“Because I have work to do, Doctor Geiszler. I suggest you do the same, and leave me to my calculations.”   
Newt persists, peering over Hermann’s shoulder, an intrusion that obviously irks the other scientist.   
“You know what I mean, Her-uh, Gottlieb.”   
Hermann slowly pushes his glasses back up his nose, very pointedly not looking at Newt.   
“No,” he says slowly. “I’m quite afraid I don’t.”   
The conversation-if you can even call it that-is obviously over, so Newt retreats back to his side of the lab. He shuffles listlessly through the pile of paperwork threatening to consume his desk, but finds himself glancing up every few minutes to watch Hermann work. Nothing about frumpy, permanently pissed-off Hermann Gottlieb should be an enigma...and yet everything about him is. He’s like a puzzle that Newt simply cannot solve, an ever-tangled thread with no apparent beginning or end. Why would Hermann, one of the world’s top mathematician, the man who juggled guest lectures at Harvard and MIT with stints as an MI6 and Wall Street consultant, give up everything to live in a shitty dormitory room and spend his days slaving away at logarithms in a windowless cement bunker? For Newt, the choice between teaching comparative biology classes to kids his own age at MIT and saving the world from enormous alien sea-monsters had been an easy one. How easy, Newt wonders, was it for Hermann? Does he have a wife, children? A life beyond the Shatterdome, beyond the functions and predictions on his chalkboard?   
Newt watches Hermann slowly cap his pen, fold his loose-leaf equations into a manilla envelope, and turn his workstation lamp off. He does not ask him these questions. He finds, quite suddenly, that he does not want to know. 

II.  
New Year’s Eve, and the Shatterdome is hosting a weak party in the wake of a category three kaiju attack, and everyone is wearing stupid paper party hats and pretending that a sea monster didn’t just trash half of Manila. The techies-young, smart kids from Hong Kong who intern for Tendo-blast music, but everyone is sporting stony faces beneath the flashing multi-colored lights. Newt mills around for a while with a lukewarm beer in his hand, not really drinking it, and makes small talk with the other lab rats, but he’s looking for someone else in the crowd, not Josie or Quong or Brooklyn. Pretty soon he’s knocked back several beers, and a shot of vodka or maybe three. His head is spinning and it’s almost midnight (or maybe midnight’s already passed, he’s lost track of time) and so he stumbles blindly out of the mess hall, shoving past Pentecost, who looks resplendent in a red Santa Claus cap. He finds himself in the narrow dormitory hall the floor below the mess, and wonders if his feet simply carried him here, like some kind of drunken Hermes. The number painted on the door isn’t his, and he’s not surprised and he can’t pretend that he didn’t know the whole damn time. So he knocks.  
“Go away,” is the muffled response from within, but he keeps banging until the door slides open and Hermann appears, looking miffed.   
“Doctor Gottlieb,” Newt slurs, pushing his way inside. Hermann nearly trips trying to hustle him out, but Newt easily overpowers the lanky mathematician. He flings himself down on Hermann’s narrow bunk, burying his face in the sheets that smell like peppermint and old wool.   
“Doctor Geiszler, I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”   
Hermann is standing awkwardly near the bed, like a visitor in a hospital room. Newt pushes himself up so he’s leaning on his elbows and squints at Hermann.   
“Are you serious, dude? It’s New Year’s Eve, you can’t be working!”   
And he’s obviously not, but that doesn’t mean that Hermann is welcoming the intrusion. And then the gong is chiming midnight somewhere in the Shatterdome, and from the floor above comes cheering and music, but this floor is painfully silent and empty and so are Newt’s arms, which he realizes that he needs to remedy right away. In one swift move (which is actually pretty spry for a drunken idiot), Newt reaches up and grabs Hermann by the collar and presses their lips together. Hermann struggles against him for a split second, stiff with shock, and then he relaxes, easing into it, sinking towards Newt. They’re like two magnets, pulled towards each other, irrevocable. Hermann pulls away suddenly, his hair mussed adorably.   
“Doctor Geiszler,” he says, and his voice is almost a pant. “You are drunk.”   
“Not too drunk to do this,” says Newt, and he lunges forwards again, pushing Hermann down onto his elbows, straddling his lap. And midnight is over, but Newt isn’t done yet, and all he can taste is cheap liquor and the sweet, sweet immortality of a first kiss. 

III.  
Things start getting worse after the category threes start coming out of the Breach. The ground starts shaking before the sirens go off, and the civilian death toll rises every time a new monster breaks through the ocean floor. Pentecost spends more time in his office with Herc Hansen, and it’s obvious that they’re discussing worst possible scenarios. The jaeger pilots develop the stony expressions and stiff walk of soldiers who have seen too much. When a kaiju destroys half of Tokyo, Newt is glad that he spends his time cooped up in the subterranean laboratories. He sees the way that Mako and Raleigh look when they come back from missions, like they’ve died a thousand deaths, like they’re haunted by a thousand ghosts. He has never really warmed to the Becket kid, but he’s known Mako since she was a little girl in a school uniform and two braids down her back. He hates the way she looks after battles, so tired, too old for her twenty years. He wants to give her a hug (or a fist-bump) but to her he’s probably just the weird kaiju-groupie from the k-labs, a geeky guy who has nothing better to do than squint through a microscope all day.   
Hermann scribbles equations on his chalkboards late into the night, skipping meals, apparently surviving on Earl Grey and the occasional cup of ramen. Newt’s always been a three-meals-a-day guy, but he finds himself spending lunch (and breakfast, and dinner) down in the lab, living off poptarts and instant noodles. He and Hermann both lose about ten pounds; Newt can afford to drop the weight, Hermann starts looking like a scarecrow. One day Hermann snaps a piece of chalk in frustration, hurling the tiny white fragments across the room, where they hit a specimen tank and shatter into snowy dust. Newt crosses the duct-tape line that divides the lab into territories (bio-land and math-hell) and stands by Hermann’s shoulder, staring at the logarithms scrawled across the board. His MIT education has afforded him the ability to decipher a function, even if he sucks at math, and the outputs for these don’t look so good. So when Hermann sinks down against the edge of his desk, cane clattering to the floor, Newt just slides his arms around Hermann’s neck and puts his head against his chest. And they stand there like that, Hermann resting his cheek against Newt’s hair, breathing in and breathing out, for a long time.

IV.   
Newt watches Hermann spiral down the drain, and he feels helpless because he can’t do anything to stop it, can only push mugs of tea and aspirin and cups of ramen across Hermann’s cluttered desk. When they kiss, it tastes like cigarettes (Hermann’s been smoking, something he swore he’d quit years ago) and melancholy. Newt considers talking to someone about it (maybe even the Shatterdome psychologist, even though he swore he’d never stoop as low as therapy) but he can’t bring himself to admit the truth, even when he’s outside Dr. Shoop’s office door. Hermann is falling apart. And there’s nothing Newt can do to stop it. 

V.   
There is nothing romantic about watching the person you love slip away. It’s not rose petals on water or lines of poetry on paper napkins or foggy windows in the rolling rain. It’s painful, and heartbreaking, and Newt feels a piece of himself shatter every time he watches Hermann slide further into the recesses of his own mind. He blames himself, blames himself for all of it. Every incorrect prediction, every problem that takes three days to solve and still does nothing.   
Newt goes out drinking the night of the worst attack. He tells himself that Hermann will be fine alone for the evening, that he’ll be better off at the Shatterdome anyway. So when the sirens go off, Newt finds himself being shepherded down into a public shelter along with the rest of the Bone Slums population. Sandwiched between a mother with two wailing toddlers and a group of drunk hobos who reek of urine, Newt listens to the screech of rending metal and wonders if it will be his last night on Earth. In the damp embrace of the shelter, he thinks that if he’s going to die, he wants to do it in someone else’s arms. Maybe Hermann. Okay, definitely Hermann. He wonders if maybe he just doesn’t want to die alone.   
It’s hours before the attack is over, and Cherno Alpha has sustained the worst of the blows, but New can’t be bothered to worry about jaegers because he runs back to the Shatterdome, waving his way through the narrow streets of the city and it’s the most exercise he’s gotten in months. Half the lights in Hong Kong have gone out, the power plants trampled, power lines twisted like shoelaces. Newt sees the ambulances, the emergency crews already working to clear the rubble away from a primary school, a shopping center. He sees a row of mangled bodies already pulled out onto the street, some half-covered with white sheets that don’t hide the bloodstains. A mother is kneeling over the corpse of a little boy, screaming, the noise in her throat raw and tortured. Newt wishes he had not seen her. Wishes that he had not come here, that he was back at the Shatterdome. By the time he gets back across the harbor, power is being restored to the city. The Shatterdome is a hive of activity, voices over the loudspeakers commanding pilots to the debriefing room, technicians to the launch pad and holding bay, but Newt doesn’t hear them, he only hears the blood pounding in his skull as he takes the stairs to the k-lab two at a time. It’s empty. He doesn’t know what he expected. So he turns around and takes the stairs three at a time to the dormitory hall. This is dedication, he tells himself. This is what love feels like. But all that Newt feels is sickly nervous, skidding to a halt outside Hermann’s door, and it’s open (what the fuck Hermann never leaves his door open, ever) and he goes inside and-  
no  
no  
Hermann dude are you okay oh god  
please god no please god no oh god oh god oh god  
Hermann please wake up  
Hermann please  
Hermann wake up man please don’t be dead please don’t be dead you can’t die you can’t leave me here you can’t leave me you can’t leave me

 

He is still on the floor when they come to collect the body. 

VI.  
They don’t talk about. No one does. Newt wears black every day, trading his usual white oxford for a somber black button-down. They have a memorial service on the launch pad overlooking the harbor, and Pentecost gives a long speech about service to the global community and dedication to science and ‘saving mankind’, but Newt can’t look at their fearless leader because they both know that Hermann Gottlieb wasn’t killed in the line of duty. Newt prepares a short speech but in the end he can’t bring himself to read it. Instead he crumples it up and shoves it deep into his jacket pocket, then wads it up and throws it into the harbor when the service is over. The body has already been flown back to Germany, following the PPDC’s code for repatriation of remains. Raleigh and Mako come down to visit him in his room, which is unusual conduct for two of the Shatterdome’s most famous pilots. Mako hugs him and Raleigh claps his shoulder hard, and it hurts but Newt just says ‘thanks’ and stares at the ground and wills himself damnit not to cry.   
Pentecost drops by and tells him that he thinks that Newt should go back to the lab.  
“I know you haven’t been since...since the accident.”   
And suddenly Newt wants to punch Pentecost in his stupid face, even though the man’s a hero and the reason that they’re all here, because Hermann Gottlieb did not die in an accident, he took his own life, swallowed enough pills to make the world spin for a minute and then disappear for good. He killed himself like a god damn fucking coward, and he left Newt all alone.   
“I think it would be good for you,” Pentecost says. “It might give you some closure. And Dr. Gottlieb requested in his living will that all of his materials be left to you.”   
“I can’t,” Newt says, and when Pentecost leaves he bursts into tears and shoves his face into the pillow and sobs until his throat is sore and his eyes hurt. But the next day, he goes down to the lab.   
Everything is still the exact same as it was the night...the night he died. But it feels empty, hollow, like an army of ghosts has passed through. Newt walks the perimeter slowly, his stomach in a hard knot of grief. Hermann’s stupid equations are still on the chalkboard, an untouched mug of tea sitting cold on his unusually cluttered desk. Newt reaches for it stupidly, to touch something that he touched, to feel the ghost of a fingerprint. All he gets is cold ceramic. He touches the papers-there must be hundreds of them-all covered in logarithms and functions predicting when the next attack will occur, photocopied graphs of kaiju activity in the Pacific, a map of the Breach. And then one, part of a paper that Newt wrote about seismic waves and kaiju size and activity. Scrawled in messy handwriting along the bottom is a single line, the ink slightly smeared, and Newt reads it and bites back a sob because how true it is, how goddamn true. There, below the equations, below the handwriting of a clockmaker god. Newt tells himself that he should start packing Hermann’s things up, maybe send some of them to his family in Germany. He wonders if they will have a funeral. He wonders if Hermann’s parents are alive, if he has any siblings. If they will weep for him. He tells himself to stop thinking, but again his fingers land on the handwritten line, and he brushes the smeared ink softly, and he thinks of Hermann and what he must have thought when he wrote this. Six words, that’s all: Too much love will kill you. Yes, my dear, he thinks, it will.


End file.
